As businesses and people become more and more dependent on the availability of ubiquitous networks and network services, network traffic management systems have an increased responsibility for the safe, secure, and efficient allocation of network resources. Further, not only are network services becoming more available they are becoming more varied. Accordingly, network traffic management systems are often responsible for supporting many different types of network services and/or applications that are being utilized by many different types of users. In some cases, network traffic flows related to different applications and/or users may be processed under different network traffic management policies. Accordingly, network traffic management systems are often responsible for determining which application or service are being used or requested by a subscriber. Determining the application or service that is being used may be useful for applying the appropriate management policy to a given network flow. However, since the numbers of different types of applications continues to increase it is becoming increasing difficult to efficiently determine an application from the network traffic. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the invention has been made.